A team of scientists at Temple University conducted a study of 1537 women in Project Viva. 1029 participants were recorded as normal weight at the beginning of their pregnancies, and 87% of them self-reported as normal weight. 508 women were classified as overweight or obese at the beginning of their pregnancies, and 86% of them self-reported accurately. The remaining 70 overweight or obese women under-estimated their size. For that group, the odds of gaining excessive weight during pregnancy increased seven-fold....

A paper published on August 23 in the journal Cell Reports, writes that those sharing very similar facial features tend to share some of the same genetic variants associated with both physical (like height or weight) and behavioral or lifestyle traits. “For decades, the existence of individuals who resemble each other without having any family ties has been described as a proven fact, but only in anecdotal terms and without any scientific justification”, said Manuel Esteller, Director of the Josep Carreras Leukemia Research Institute, ICREA Research Professor, Professor of Genetics at the University of Barcelona, and author of the study, said in a press release....

“You flip upside down and then rotate,” says Davis, a 25-year-old from Atlanta. “So you’re inverted, but you’re being forced toward the ground because the props are still spinning.” Davis is one of the pioneers in the sport of first-person-view drone racing. Pilots competing in the races wear goggles that give them a drone’s-eye aerial view, streamed from cameras on their machines. The effect is as if they had been miniaturized and placed in tiny drone cockpits....

Kacper Wierzchos and Theodore Pruyne, astronomers with the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, first spotted the object. They estimate it measures between six and 12 feet long, and it streaked across the sky on February 15 while they scanned for asteroids. Now, after about ten days of observations by a handful of observatories, the Minor Planet Center has released the details of the satellite’s orbit—a looping, erratic path around Earth. By extrapolating that trajectory backward and forward, researchers estimate that the object, dubbed 2020 CD3, came under the Earth’s gravitational influence in October 2017, and will depart on March 7 of this year, according to Robert Jedicke, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii....

The study, which was presented at a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D.C. last week, took brain scans of people who insisted they were still madly in love with their partners, even though they had been married for decades. When shown a picture or their spouse, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanned the brains of 10 women and seven men* who had been married, on average, 21 years and took a snapshot of their cerebral reaction....

The purpose of the flights is a chance “to salute those working on the frontline of the COVID-19 response,” the Blue Angels’ commander Brian Kesselring said in a statement. With the Air Force saying that “several” of these flights are in the works in the near future—the next flybys are happening over Atlanta, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, on May 2—here’s what to know about the fighter jets that could be cruising over your hometown....

The Versa 3’s Design The design of the 40mm aluminum case is also sleeker than that of its 39mm predecessor’s, in that it doesn’t have a visible button on its side. Both generations of the Versa are more rounded than the Apple Watch and therefore look more like regular digital watches than an industrial flavor of smartwatch. This is a plus if you’re looking for subtlety, and an accessory you wear nearly 24 hours a day ought to look subtle....

“We were and remain in deep trauma… grasping for hope,” says Bob Brown, a community activist who chairs WOW Outreach, a community-based organization dedicated to eliminating inter-person violence in Flint. “We are very resilient in Flint, but the trauma of what was done to us will take a long time to get over.” Brown is among those in the Flint community working with Laura Schmit Olabisi, an associate professor of community sustainability and environmental science and policy at Michigan State University, to help locals cope with the ongoing health effects of lead poisoning....

The new elements were added after the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) reviewed scientific studies published by teams of researchers in the United States, Japan, and Russia. The committee deemed that the researchers had “met the criteria for discovery,” as the press release notes, which essentially means that the researchers were able to create them in the lab, if only fleetingly. These elements are among the heaviest in the periodic table and aren’t known to exist outside the lab....

But what does paper art have to do with these things, you may ask? Indeed, origami has been practiced for centuries and involves folding shapes like birds and boxes out of paper. Japanese origamist Akira Yoshizawa has been credited for helping to popularize it in the 20th century, developing a picture-based set of instructions that served as a universal language, fostering collaborations between artists and scientists. But since the 1960s, and especially in the last few years, the overlap between origami, mathematics, engineering and other disciplines has grown....

When Jim Schefter interviewed Steve Jobs for Popular Science’s March 1984 review of Apple’s new Macintosh, Jobs asked Schefter, “What do you think?” Schefter confessed, “I didn’t have an answer.” He did, however, find an answer, sharing his wonder at the ease of use of novel applications like MacPaint, with never-before-experienced drag-and-drop capabilities. “It was all too much to absorb,” writes Schefter. While Schefter focused on Macintosh’s unrivaled functionality and acknowledged its unique form factor (“it looks different”), his review overlooked the significance of Apple’s seminal commercial from just months before: On January 22, 1984, with 6:32 left to play in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, the announcers cut to a commercial directed by Ridley Scott—one that would forever change TV-ad norms and raise the Super Bowl bar....

According to Jonathan Schaeffer, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta who demonstrates A.I. using games, “The possible number of chess games is so huge that no one will invest the effort to calculate the exact number.” Some have estimated it at around 10100,000. Out of those, 10120 games are “typical”: about 40 moves long with an average of 30 choices per move. There are only 10^15 total hairs on all the human heads in the world, 10^23 grains of sand on Earth, and about 10^81 atoms in the universe....

Much of the flavor in a cut of meat comes from its fat composition, and an animal’s diet contributes significantly to this. However, due to the average consumer’s taste for meat that is not too strong-tasting, it is more important to figure out what we don’t want the animals we consume to be eating. Dinosaurs that ate marine animals would definitely be off the list, not only for their fishy flavor, but also because the high amount of oil in fish would make the meat more susceptible to oxidation, which would give it a rancid taste....

For starters, the machine will set you back $10,000 to purchase. You’ll then need to buy between 350 and 490 pounds of feedstock to make your first batch. E-Fuel, the company marketing the device, is also planning to offer a program to buy discounted sugar feedstock at a cost of 15 to 30 cents a pound. It takes 10 to 14 pounds to produce a gallon of ethanol. Assuming your first batch costs the low end of 15 cents per pound and you need 10 pounds per gallon, you’ve already spent $1....

Churn through temporary numbers with Burner When you don’t want to risk spam and harassment on your real phone number, disposable numbers can be a godsend. Assign yourself a random phone number, give it out to people for one-time use, then delete it and grab another number whenever you feel the need. Burner is an app available for iOS and Android that allows you to pick a number from any area code you desire, and whenever someone calls it, Burner will forward them to your phone....

A circuit enmeshed in an edible jelly mold monitors the number of sips taken, using an accelerometer that tracks the drink’s motion, and calculates how drunk you are based on a timer. Using three cubes with different LED lights, your drink changes color from green to orange to red, letting you know when you should take it easy. The lights in the ice cubes pulse along with the music. because hey, drinking is supposed to be fun....

Google Now runs in the background of the latest Android operating system (Jelly Bean 4.1) and quietly keeps track of searches, calendar events, locations, and travel patterns. It then synthesizes all that info and alerts you—either through notifications in the menu bar or cards on the search screen—of transit alerts for your commute, box scores for your favorite sports team, nearby watering holes, and more. You can assume it will someday suggest a lot more....

But Google’s robotics researchers are exploring a way to fix that. They’ve developed a robot that can write its own programming code based on natural language instructions. Instead of having to dive into a robot’s configuration files to change block_target_color from #FF0000 to #FFFF00, you could just type “pick up the yellow block” and the robot would do the rest. Code as Policies (or CaP for short) is a coding-specific language model developed from Google’s Pathways Language Model (PaLM) to interpret the natural language instructions and turn them into code it can run....

Street View’s two main sources of photos are by car and by human trekker. The car mainly maps the streets, while the trekkers go to locations that are hard to drive to, like the bottom of the Grand Canyon or the top of Machu Picchu. But there are other assets that Google uses off the beaten path too, such as a flock of sheep that helped capture the Faroe Islands....

In 2012, genome researchers sequenced the DNA of an unborn human baby, the western lowland gorilla, fruits and grains, and livestock.